Trump’s war on Wall Street landlords could raise your rent |
Employees work at the construction site of a new residence on November 13, 2025, in Altadena, California.
Wall Street is “gobbling up” America’s homes. Firms with names like BlackRock (or Blackstone or SablePebble) are shouldering their way into every suburban open house and offering 50 percent above asking price — in a bid to consolidate control of local markets and then jack up rents with impunity. As a result, America’s young families have been locked out of homeownership, while its renters have been price-gouged into poverty. If we want to make housing affordable again, we must ban Big Finance from buying single-family homes.
This is one of the most influential accounts of America’s housing crisis.
The narrative has spread virally for years on social media. More nuanced versions of the tale have appeared in major publications and congressional press releases. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump pledged to “ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” then signed an executive order Tuesday that heavily restricts such purchases. And progressive Democrats in the Senate are cheering him on.
Unfortunately, the story spurring these policies is largely false. Corporate investment in single-family homes is not a major driver of Americans’ high housing costs. To the contrary, that investment has likely made housing in the United States more affordable. The “BlackRock ate our homes” narrative owes its popularity to its ideological convenience, not empirical validity.
Key takeaways
Institutional investors own less than 1 percent of America’s single-family homes — far too little to explain high home prices. Corporate investment in houses has likely reduced rents and segregation. America’s housing crisis is driven by scarcity, not speculation.Wall Street greed didn’t cause America’s housing crisis
Housing is unquestionably too expensive in the United States.
In 2024, the median price of a single family home hit a record $412,500 — five times the median US income. Back in the 1990s, such a property cost only about three times as much as the typical family earned.
Meanwhile, roughly one-third of Americans — and one half of renters — spend more than 30 percent of their earnings on housing. And this cost crunch is especially severe in vibrant coastal cities, where economic opportunity is concentrated.
Given these facts, if we want to explain America’s housing crisis, we need to identify forces that have:
Exerted a large influence on housing markets nationally. Impacted high-cost areas more than lower-cost ones.Wall Street investment in single-family homes meets neither of these criteria.
At the national level, such investment is miniscule. As of 2022, institutional investors owned 0.55 percent of single-family homes in the United States, and only 3 percent of single-family rentals. That year, the largest of these investors, Invitation Homes, held just 0.6 percent of America’s rental houses.
We lack comprehensive data for more recent years. But we know the picture has not radically changed. The property intelligence company Cotality tracks all home purchases by investor size. And mega-investors have........